The morning of the all hands summon to the Blasted Lands, Aely went for a walk. The late fall air was clear and cool, and leaves crunched under their feet in the less-traveled parts of the streets. She and Roger took the long way around Old Town, south through Tanner Circle and down Bulwarks, across […]

There’s a discussion over at WTT:RP going on about recruitment in RP, and how it differs from other guild types.

Roleplay guilds, by their very nature, can’t really function in the same way as raiding guilds. I’ve talked about that before, particularly when I got a chance to review the Guild Leader’s Handbook. Actually, that post is a good intro to what makes roleplaying guilds different from other sorts of guilds in general.

On top of all that, these days raiding really is affected if your group is not all from the same guild, thanks to the guild leveling system. But there is no “bonus” for having everyone at a roleplaying event be in the same guild. Chat channels serve exactly the same function as guild chat, and most events are even better set up to use /say and /yell.

I don’t think recruiting has to involve broadcasting in trade “OPEN RP NIGHT!” or “LOOKING FOR MORE FOR RP!” – mostly because that’s a really good way to get griefed/trolled. But posting on the realm forum, RPing in the open, and having open events are all things that show that we’re around, open to roleplay, and willing to interact with others. These things become a form of roleplay specific recruiting.

In that light, I disagree with Bricu that the Wildfire Riders don’t recruit.

While he’s right that we don’t recruit in the traditional manner for guild spots (guild membership can be a long and involved and not overly linear process), we are always open to new roleplayers. When someone whispers me about my guild, I invite them to a Tuesday Pub Night – that’s where we do our “recruiting”. Not necessarily for our actual guild, but for our circle of roleplayers, which is really a much wider net.

The Riders aren’t just the Riders. We’re the Riders and Associates, and I think that’s a good thing. It allows characters like Annorah to be around and roleplay with others, without having to wear a guild tag that she probably wouldn’t intentionally pick up. She fits in with the larger whole, but not necessarily under the direct command of Tarquin and his band of (mostly) neutral aligned players.

As a player (and not an officer) in an RP guild, I like that method of “recruiting” – we’re always open to new people, and our RP is often public enough for others to join in, especially if they show up more than once, but we avoid the awkwardness of a player joining the guild and just not being a good fit – IC or OOC. Given the close knit structure of a lot of roleplay guilds, that’s a really good thing. Guilds become almost like organisms, and it’s hard to recover from a bad trial run when someone is thrown into that already functioning organism and turns out to be a poor fit.

Having a wider net of active roleplay also exposes players to other guilds (a good thing), and helps to reinforce that RP happens WITH you, not TO you – you have to be willing to participate, not just join up and expect the RP to magically happen.

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Too Many Annas ?

Anna is a 20-something gamer on the Feathermoon (US RP-PVE) Server in World of Warcraft. Here you'll find all kinds of
assorted things about WoW, including roleplay, raiding, and whatever else Anna feels like rambling about today. She's got a lot of alts, so you never know what you'll find!